I just noticed that someone posted a Reddit alert about a recent article of mine, “What the 2012 Election Was … and Wasn’t.” In the article, in part, I described how Obama was going to go after Medicare and Social Security. I included in that article an excellent prognostication by Glenn Greenwald. In response to this article someone posted the following comment at Reddit:

“I am a reliable liberal voter and donor and before reading this had just phoned all of my representatives in DC to tell them that I would support raising the eligibility ages for SS and Medicare as part of a bargain to avoid sequestration.

"So I found the breakdown of how things will go in this article pretty unconvincing.“

Is this person saying that because he (I don’t know this person’s gender) just got through telling his representatives that he’s willing to make concessions on limiting Social Security and Medicare, that my exposing the disutility of that is what makes it “unconvincing?”

In other words, if you just did something based on a mistaken notion, if someone tells you that it’s mistaken, you’re going to find his exposure of that unconvincing because it means having to reconsider what you’ve done?

"You're telling me that the guy selling me land in the Florida Everglades was convicted of fraud? I just gave him most of my retirement money, so he can't be a fraud."

Truth and facts are under unprecedented siege. What is convenient to believe does not make it true. Truth is something that exists independently of whether we want to believe it or not. Otherwise, truth becomes merely the most popular notion or what we stick to because it makes us feel better.

But then, that stance does describe mass popular culture today and the official political scene so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that so many should demonstrate a penchant for convenient truths. What we need more than anything are those people who by definition are going to be a small minority at first, to bravely stand up and say that they stand for what’s right and what’s true, irrespective of which sacred cow gets harmed.

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